Devising #3 - Buttercup, Buttercup...

For this session, we really tried to adapt our characters emotionally, and to give our audience an insight into why they’re the way they are. The bond we tried to create was one that was very obviously broken, one that had been broken for a very long time, specifically between Hayley and Caroline. Caroline had taken the hit for a murder that Hayley committed, and after years of Hayley’s denial of her part in the murder, and refusal to answer any of Caroline’s questions or apologise; Caroline has had enough. Kimberly is the one who’s trying to patch up to holes in the relationship between her two older sisters. She loves both of them, regardless of what they’ve done. Hayley thinks she’s keeping Kim safe by saving her the real truth, but Caroline is fed up by the emotional manipulation.

It was really hard at first to try and think of ways we could create an emotional hardship between the sisters. We knew we wanted to drop hints to the audience without telling them the full backstory, and therefore that made our job much harder, as we had to map out an entire backstory and then pick snippets of it to show. We had to make sure it was easy enough to understand without being too complicated, and we had to make sure our audience still stayed interested, and that it was still fun for us to perform.

We came to the discussion that it would have been an interesting take if Hayley had suffered emotional childhood trauma that Caroline or Kimberly didn’t suffer themselves. This is where it proved difficult, because we couldn’t be too vague otherwise our audience wouldn’t understand what was actually being talked about, but we couldn’t be too graphic in case of triggering people in the audience who might have suffered similar things in their life.

The idea came around that the abuse had taken place at the hands of the girls’ uncle, when Hayley was 12, and Caroline was 7, and Kimberly wasn’t born at this point. We discussed the incorporation of the ‘Buttercup’, as very early on in the piece Caroline calls Hayley ‘Buttercup’, and we didn’t just want it to be a passing comment. Originally, we were going to revolve the childhood trauma in a field of buttercups, but we changed it soon after writing the draft because we couldn’t get a feel for what Hayley was actually getting emotional about, and it just felt like there wasn’t room for any adaptation.

Our final result of the ‘Buttercup’ story was that Caroline was baking with their ‘Nanna Rose’, while Hayley was being inappropriately photographed and abused by their ‘Uncle Jack’ in the barn of the ranch their grandparents owned. It later comes out in Hayley’s monologue that Caroline knew what was going on between Jack and Hayley, unlike her clueless Nanna and parents, and she didn’t tell anyone through the fear of being yelled at. We used this as a way to tie in that Hayley is almost treating this like Caroline’s revenge, as she didn’t help her when she was younger, and Caroline was stupid enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and take the hit for murder. It ended up far more manipulative and twisted than we originally planned, however it really fit with the tension that sits between Caroline and Hayley. Another thing I really liked about this part of the story, is that Kimberly finds out about all of Hayley’s abuse at the same time as the audience, and so the realisation for Kimberly that she’s been kept out of more truths comes at a really hard hitting and powerful time for the story.